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JUNE 10, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Little “T” Trauma By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
I
picked up a book that I hadn’t read in over 20 years, and I was surprised by a statement in it. The author, Terry Real – who has made presentations in the Five Towns before COVID – is discussing the research of Catherine Steiner Adair of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center. She was researching the transition in our society for little girls who, at age 8, when asked what they want on their pizza, will clearly tell you, “extra cheese and some peppers.” But when those same girls get to 12, they suddenly “don’t know” what they want. And at 13 and older, they turn to the person asking and say, “What do you want?” Real has one word for this process of how a child grows to be a woman who has lost her voice: he calls it trauma. Terry Real is not a feminist. He’s a humanitarian. He also asserts that the way little boys in our society are trained to lose their emotions is traumatic, too. He tells the story of his own son, Alexander, who at 3 liked to dress up in various costumes. One day, his older brother’s friends came over and
Alexander appeared at the top of the stairs dressed as Barbie, in a beautiful silver dress. His brothers’ friends didn’t make fun of him; they were too well-brought up for that. But their gaping mouths “told” little Alexander that he had crossed a forbidden line. He ran up to his room, filled with shame and never wore that particular costume again. He got the message. At 3. Without words. So even if a person has not been abused, made fun of, neglected, or mistreated in any way, our society creates conditions to literally traumatize children, both boys and girls: boys by learning to adhere to the code of what makes a “man” (and that means never, ever acting like a girl and stuffing emotions) and girls by losing their voice, and ultimately their identity, to the will of those they are connected to. At that time, no one recognized any of this as trauma. We all thought of trauma as airplane crashes and attacks by strangers. But the evidence started piling up that trauma exists in the everyday lives of millions of people. Now, they’re calling this “little ‘t’ trauma.” Bessel van der Kolk started look-
ing into the concept of trauma with a little “t.” He initially was working with veterans who’d returned from Vietnam. Their PTSD very clearly constituted trauma, actually, big “T” trauma. However, when he moved on to study the civilian population in inpatient treatment facilities, he started seeing parallels between those people and the vets. He went on from there to make sense of the neuroscience underlying the same phenomena that he saw in both populations. But there were gnawing questions. It seemed like maybe there was a relationship between the terrible “Borderline Personality Disorder” (BPD) and trauma. Maybe it affected the other personality disorders, too. Van der Kolk and colleagues studied this with a survey of personality-disordered patients. They created a questionnaire which began innocently enough and gradually explored deeper and more personal topics. What they learned “stunned” them. To the question, “‘Was there anybody you felt safe with growing up?’ one out of four patients we inter-
viewed could not recall anyone they had felt safe with as a child.” (From The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.) “Imagine,” van der Kolk continues, “being a child and not having a source of safety, making your way into the world unprotected and unseen.” People went beyond the questions that were asked to open up their own stories. “Men and women reported lying awake at night listening to furniture crashing and parents screaming…. Others talked about not being picked up at elementary school or coming home to find an empty house.” So, wait a minute: Was this trauma at all? Doesn’t this happen to almost everyone? Why, Dr. Deb, are you making mountains out of molehills? Let’s follow van der Kolk – and others – a little more: We “realized that the BPD group’s problems – dissociation, desperate clinging to whoever might be enlisted to help – had probably started off as ways of dealing with overwhelming emotions and inescapable brutality.” They found that “81 percent of the patients diagnosed with BPD at
